


Higher Love

by Miss_M



Series: J/B in Depeche Mode Key [1]
Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Depeche Mode
Genre: Angst, Death, F/M, Post - A Dance With Dragons, Regret, Songfic, death by fire
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-02
Updated: 2014-02-02
Packaged: 2018-01-10 22:08:22
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,541
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1165115
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Miss_M/pseuds/Miss_M
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Beheading would be too good for him, of course.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Higher Love

**Author's Note:**

> It all started with the Shuffled challenge when I ‘drew’ Depeche Mode’s “Mercy in You” ([fic](http://archiveofourown.org/works/1021567)). Which got me thinking about how much I love DM songs, for their eroticism, their darkness, and their emotional rawness. Which spawned this: a series of one-shots inspired by my favorite DM songs, all from Jaime’s POV, each a possible post-ADWD (really post-Stoneheart) future for J/B. Can be read in any order, I’m posting them in the order in which I wrote them. Think of them as parallel worlds, spokes of a wheel with canon as its hub, rather than linked stories. 
> 
> The lyrics can be found [here](http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/depechemode/higherlove.html). I own nothing.

Beheading would be too good for him, of course. 

Beheading is for thieves and rapers and ordinary murderers. Kingslayers, traitors and blasphemers are not accorded even the dubious dignity of kneeling before smallfolk, the mob’s contorted, baying mouths like a myriad small hells opening to swallow his head when it separates from his neck, to lap up his blood. Jaime has never been one of those misguided, foolish nobles who pity the smallfolk, who try to better their lives. Peasants and Fleabottom guttersnipes should be grateful they draw breath and for whatever peace they get to enjoy. Public executions are the dollop of honey in their porridge, a luxury, and how the mob loves luxury. Even more than highborn ladies love their lace and jewels. 

While two of the Unsullied tie his elbows behind the pillar, Jaime wonders if the sea of heads spreading before his bound feet might not prefer a good, old-fashioned beheading. Blood dripping off the headsman’s sword, thick as pitch and Lannister red, steaming in the cold air. Still, he imagines watching a man be burned alive has its charms: the screaming, picked up and augmented till it echoes across the square before the Great Sept, the hot ashes dancing on the salty breeze like black snow, the scent of roasting flesh. To people who have survived the Winter on mostly empty bellies, that smell must be absolutely delightful. 

It is one of the Dragon Queen’s Eastern innovations, burning certain of her enemies alive. More entertaining than edifying, to be sure, but the mob will have its amusements. It makes one wonder who truly rules: the queen who gives them peace and charity and public executions, or the smallfolk who pipe under her windows for more blood, more fire, more death and ashes. 

These are the sorts of thoughts with which Jaime passed the interminable time in the black cells, days and weeks without sunrise or moonset, without words spoken to another human being who was not inside his head. Tyrion, long gone, appreciated his musings on the realm’s power balance. His father, dead and rotting, scoffed. Cersei, dead and burned, turned her back on him. 

Brienne listened very carefully, nodded after giving it some thought. It made sense to her. Everything Jaime did always made sense to her. 

Jaime wonders what she would say if she could see him now, the pillar to which they tied him pressing against his spine, forcing him to keep his head high and stare across the crowd. They had to force his elbows back to embrace the pillar, and tie them together with rough hempen rope. 

He wishes the Dragon Queen gave the smallfolk a real show and sicced one of her precious dragons on him, turned him into a human torch, but of course there would be too many possibilities for a lick of wind or a shift in the crowd to catch the whole square on fire. After what Jaime revealed once he’d been called to give an account of himself to the queen, it would not do for the daughter of the man who nearly torched the capital to finish what her father had failed to accomplish. 

For a brief moment which wings away even as he indulges in it, Jaime wishes Brienne _were_ one of those faces below his feet, even if he were not able to find her, though he is certain he would. She would stand taller than all of them, a true giant among mice. Those eyes of hers would blaze out from the unwashed throng, sapphires in the dust. He only wishes this for the space of a labored breath. Surely a man tied alive to his own funeral pyre can be allowed a heartbeat of weakness. 

The wench is better off where she is, on her precious island, so much water all around her Jaime is certain not all the dragons that ever were could do her harm. He had only begged for one thing, and he trusts the Dragon Queen to be a woman of her word, for all her Eastern perversions. Let Brienne be buried on Tarth when her time comes, a maid and the Kingslayer’s whore all at once. She always was a miracle of nature, she can manage to live and die as both. She cannot be other after he pleaded for her life, on his knees before the Iron Throne and the slip of a girl who sits on it now. 

Jaime flatters himself that he is right in this: Brienne will never wed, stubborn and proud to the end. Once the raven with news of his fiery demise reaches her, she will consider it a debt of honor not to give up to some land-greedy knight what she never quite dared offer to Jaime and he never dared demand. More fool he. Still, it warms him inside to think of her, alive and well and mourning him. Alive and his in a way she never would have been, even could they have been wedded and bedded. Alive. 

For all that they supposedly know no fear, the Unsullied are not so stupid as to stand next to raging flames. They douse the mountain of kindling under his feet with wildfire and move away. Apparently Daenerys Targaryen does not consider it in poor taste to thus kill the man who prevented her father from murdering an entire city with the thrice-damned substance. The girl would probably call it poetic justice. The follies of youth. 

Jaime smirks and wonders how quickly she will learn better, how soon the throne will cut her so she bleeds through all her pretty silks, soils everything she touches. Everybody is ruined by that which they once held most precious: he by the white cloak, the Targaryen girl by that ugly throne, Brienne by him, Jaime. 

No. That is wrong. He was soiled by that which he’d once held dear, but Brienne was not. She will never cease to hold him dear, he knows. How could she, since the stupid wench will believe he traded his life for hers, though if she stopped to think about it she would realize he had nothing to trade when he went down on his knees before the queen and begged. 

He had been dying once before, weak with fever and despair, and had not been too proud to lean on Brienne’s arm and let her hold him up. He was not feverish, just long past despair, when they dragged him before the throne. A dead man has nothing with which to bargain, so Jaime made himself small and weak and as humble as he could, and he begged. 

For all their differences, the Targaryen girl and Brienne have one thing in common: their blond heads were stuffed full of silly songs about lovers separated by fate and willing to throw away their lives for each other. No greater love than to sacrifice oneself for another, and all that. 

Jaime knows Brienne would not care any less, even if she did stop to think about it. He was a fool never to have touched her, never to have told her. She knows the truth of him, but he still should have said it, done it, done something, so she would have more than the conviction of her loyal heart to warm her in the years to come. He’d taunted Catelyn Stark with how cold her widow’s bed must have been, yet Brienne’s bed will be cold for all her days, and she neither was nor will be wife, widow or whore. He should have done _something_.

A great purpose is being accomplished by his execution: let the whole realm see the Kingslayer was just a man and less than a man, how he burned like a haunch of mutton left too long on the spit. His death will not cushion the Targaryen queen’s seat on the Iron Throne, but it will demonstrate who she is to anyone who may have missed what her armies did on numerous battlefields, what her dragons wrought against the most staunchly rebellious Houses. 

Jaime does not expect to be lifted on wings of flame up to one of the heavens, cleansed of all his sins. He regrets few of his deeds, denies none of them. His sole regret is a light enough burden to bear, knowing Brienne is safe and alive without him. As the flames begin to lick up his legs, Aerys’s vengeance long delayed and upon him at last, Jaime bites his lip to hold back the screams, inevitable as the sunrise, make the mob and its queen wait on his pleasure a few painful heartbeats longer. His plate-armored heart and whatever is left of his wretched soul are scorching, softening, dripping away like molten lead. He smells delicious on his upright spit. 

Jaime tells himself he is not burning. It is merely gentle hands, covered in scars and freckles, chafing his limbs on a Winter night, under blankets heavy as a mountain of hot ash. The blue sky glimpsed through the smoke has nothing on her eyes. Blood from bitten lips fills Jaime’s mouth and turns his screams to a liquid firebird’s trill, and he lets Brienne warm him.


End file.
